The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society Page 7

  Hamid stopped in his tracks, one hand shooting out to prevent the others moving forward and whispered, nodding his head towards the track. The others crouched back, frowning hard at me. I stood rooted to the spot unable to work out what the hell was going on and then it dawned on me. They’d seen our scarecrow: a deceptively life-like hunter that a sculptor friend had erected in the field, as a folly and a deterrent to wild boar. He’d shaped the body on a wire frame, covered it with acrylic painted plaster, and to add an authentic touch had positioned a wooden shotgun in the cradle of his arms and a painted cigarette dangling from his lips. The clothes were my own cast-offs and, to keep the wild boar on its toes, our model hunter’s neckscarf was soaked from time to time in Zotal, which, refreshed by dew, purportedly smells like BO.

  As soon as they understood their mistake, Hamid and his friends broke into smiles, but they were the brittle, hesitant smiles of people who still had much to fear and can’t give anything unusual the benefit of the doubt. ‘Try and sleep for a few hours if you can,’ I said, handing Hamid another pack of cigarettes Ana had provided. ‘We’ll leave at eleven.’ And I unlocked the door of the cámara and handed them the key.

  The Moroccans looked around the room in open-mouthed amazement, exclaiming at the number of books and beds and then, delightedly, as if finding a long-lost cherished item, picked up the djelaba and babouches – the traditional Moroccan cloak and slippers – that I had hanging on the back of the door. The impression that we were an alien people might have diminished a tiny bit. Once again we shook hands and bowed. ‘Merci, monsieur. Merci,’ said Hamid, holding on to my hand.

  I returned to Ana at the table and we talked over the plan. I felt deeply uneasy about El Ejido. ‘The gangs who run some of those farms are hardly better than the Mafia,’ I worried. ‘I don’t know if it’s enough that there are other Moroccans there. If only we could employ them here, and pay them decently and house them like human beings.’

  ‘We couldn’t sustain it, Chris,’ Ana replied. ‘We don’t have enough work for them, or the money to keep on paying them properly, and we’re just too exposed. Someone would be bound to denounce them sooner or later.’ But she hated the thought of El Ejido even more than I did. We had both heard stories of the farms’ brutal treatment of Moroccan and Eastern Europeans, who, without legal status, were worked like slaves and casually subjected to fearful levels of toxic chemicals. Such is the price paid for Europe’s out-ofseason fruit and vegetables. However, we couldn’t think of a better alternative, despite talking the subject round and round until late in the evening, so at ten-thirty I wiped the grime off the car windscreen and went up to the cámara to gather my passengers.

  The room was empty. Our guests had already gone. I shouted into the gathering night – ‘Hamid! Hamid!’ – but nothing. It seemed that, when it came to it, they had decided not to trust us. I hoped that they would maintain the same wariness in their dealings with the agricultural mob at the other end.

  The next morning I woke early and, seeing Jesús Carrasco with his goats in the valley, went down to join him. He hadn’t noticed any Moroccans passing but listened with interest to my account of their stay. ‘They’re young. What can they know of all these things they’ll have to face?’ he said, in an unusually compassionate tone. He told me that many of the farmers in the remote cortijos will do what they can to relieve the misery of migrants who come their way – not much, of course, for they haven’t much to give, but they will give them bread and olives and a safe place to rest. ‘Some of the old people have seen their children walk away to find work,’ he explained. ‘Maybe not quite so desperate – but people here know about poverty and what it drives you to.’

  It was strange to be talking with such seriousness with Jesús. It threw me back to a conversation I’d had once with Domingo, where he mentioned that he’d gone to Barcelona as a young man to work in a bottle factory. It was muy mal, he had said, and then sharply changed the subject as if unwilling to linger. I realised that, although he often speaks of Catalunya, he’d never again made the slightest reference to having lived there himself. But my musing was interrupted. Jesús nudged me and pointed to the bend at the top of the cliff. ‘Guardia Civil,’ he muttered. ‘I wonder what they want.’

  Jesús’s skill in picking out moving objects on the horizon has been honed by years of watching goats. It took another few minutes before I could make out the distant car and then the tell tale police light, but I watched with dismay as it drew closer, forded the river and came bumping up the track to arrive by the side of the fence between the alfalfa and the eucalyptus grove. Now, the Guardia don’t like to get their cars wet and would only ford our river for the most serious of purposes. They had come to make an arrest.

  Manolo, who had arrived on his motorbike just a few minutes earlier, ambled towards the car in his usual open manner – he had no knowledge of the Moroccans’ visit and was treating the arrival of the police as a slice of daily soap opera. The officers were indeed following a tip-off – though this denunciation, it transpired, had nothing to do with our guests of last night. No, they were seeking a ‘furtive hunter’ (I translate literally here) who had been seen staking out the alfalfa fields down by the river, waiting to pot a jabali, or wild boar.

  Now, it’s illegal to hunt the jabali unless you have a licence for caza mayor – big game – and, besides, the policemen had heard that this character was acting suspiciously. Perhaps the most suspicious aspect of his behaviour was the fact that he had remained in exactly the same position for eleven months and stank of Zotal.

  Manolo found the civiles shuffling around beside the car looking embarrassed. ‘Come to arrest our scarecrow?’ he asked.

  The worthy officials muttered to each other and cast around for something with which to lambast Manolo and save face.

  ‘We hear there have been hunters on your land. Is that true?’ they demanded.

  ‘No – at least – not the flesh-and-blood ones,’ he chortled.

  I arrived at this moment. ‘Well, make sure you let us know if you see any,’ said the older officer, sternly. Then, barely missing a beat, he turned on me and demanded brusquely, ‘What’s that car doing there?’

  He was pointing to a bamboo grove where a rusting old wreck had weeds curling out through the windscreen.

  ‘That’s where we keep the sheep feed – so the rats can’t get it,’ I answered.

  ‘That one, then. What about that one?’ He indicated another forsaken old banger at the end of the alfalfa field.

  ‘That one works,’ chipped in Manolo, enjoying the exchange enormously. ‘It’s for getting stuff to and from the bridge.’

  ‘There’s another one up the hill there. Why?’ The civiles were getting infuriated.

  ‘That’s for spares for the one that runs to the bridge and back,’ I replied.

  ‘Well, let me tell you, señores, that it’s illegal to have old cars lying about in the countryside. Get rid of them, and quick. If they’re still here next week, I’m denouncing you and there’s a big fine.’ And with that, the duo marched off to their car.

  GRANADA WELCOMES

  THE PLIGHT OF THE YOUNG MOROCCAN men brought home to me just how vulnerable immigrants can become when forced to live and work outside the legal sector. I felt that I had to try and do something to help. But I wasn’t at all sure what that something should be; I’m a bit of a non-starter as an activist, possessing none of the qualities I presumed essential: I can’t hold the attention of a meeting, and my administrative skills are hopelessly poor. Yet what did aptitude matter? The point, surely, was to try. So, grasping the bull by the horns, I signed myself up as a volunteer in an organisation called Granada Acoge.

  Granada Acoge – ‘Granada Welcomes’ – is the local branch of an immigrants’ welfare organisation that exists throughout Andalucía to look after the interests of immigrants, legal or illegal, wherever they have come from. In Granada, you can find them – a largely voluntary, part-time team of lawyer
s, social workers, doctors, translators and teachers – in a cramped office, really just a small house, in a back alley called Aguas de Cartuja. Three telephone lines or more ring constantly, the waiting room is crammed to bursting with hopeful newcomers from all corners of the globe, and every ninety seconds the doorbell rings and someone comes in. Somebody leaves about every half-hour, so by the end of the morning the place is bursting at the seams.

  I was to work as a general-purpose volunteer, and the first morning I turned up bright and eager and was placed under the tutelage of Mati, the rather sexy woman who ran the telephone and the door. Mati chain-smoked and spoke in a husky drawl, and I could tell by the way that she peered sideways at me through sultry-lidded eyes that she was wondering what a middle-aged Englishman was doing in a place like this. At length she decided that I was like some kind of foreign child and began to establish a way of dealing with me. She spoke slowly, enunciating her words with care and regarding me closely to see if I had understood.

  Usually, I hadn’t. The system they had, and there had to be a system, was so utterly impenetrable that, no matter how many times she repeated it, it still lay way beyond my grasp. I had been too long outside the orbit of offices, organisations, routines and fitting in with established patterns of work. Indeed, my last ‘proper job’ (‘proper’, I suspect, disallows farming or writing), was half a lifetime ago, in my twenties, working night shifts in a paper-clip factory in Utrecht.

  ‘Bueno,’ enunciated Mati slowly. ‘Your first job is to answer the telephone…’ I heaved a sigh of relief. Surely I could make the grade as a telephone receptionist. I didn’t tell Mati that I once spent ten minutes trying to phone Spain from my sister’s house in London before my fiveyear-old niece took the ‘phone’ out of my hands, pointed it at the telly and switched channels.

  ‘First’, Mati continued, ‘you must establish if a client has been here before, then if they already have an appointment, then what their problem is, and, according to what they tell you, you must do one of the following: If they have not been here before you must put them through to Juanma. That’s number six… unless of course it’s his illegal day, when it’s line four… or if he’s not here – he might be in court, for example – then put the call through to Inma. Inma will be on Juanma’s line – four that is – until coffee break, then you’ll have to try her on her own line, which is five, but she’s often not there and you’ll have to ring Eduardo to find out where she is. Eduardo is line two and sometimes you have to press the button more than once. Are you alright so far?’

  I nodded eagerly, not altogether grasping the finer points.

  ‘Now, that’s if they haven’t got an appointment. If they have got an appointment, you must check it in the appointment book…’

  ‘How do I do that?’ I asked, thinking I ought to be asking an intelligent question or two.

  Mati pulled hard on her cigarette and narrowed her eyes. ‘You ask them for their name and then see if that name is written down in the book. If it is, they have got an appointment, and if it isn’t, they haven’t. You got that?’

  I wasn’t sure: this was moving outside my league.

  ‘Because there are some who will try and fool you into thinking they have an appointment when in fact they haven’t…’

  ‘Is there no depth to which people won’t sink?’

  Mati didn’t think that comment worth noticing and, stubbing out her cigarette, opened the door and lit another one. Having dealt calmly with an agitated Senegalese woman who had burst in armed with a sheaf of forms, she lit yet another cigarette and continued with my induction.

  ‘Now, if they fulfil both the conditions of having been here before and having an appointment, you must find out what they want. If it’s a legal problem, then Fatima will deal with it, but you must be careful because often what sounds like a legal problem is in fact a social problem. Our social worker is Erminia and she’s only here on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. She shares a room with Eduardo, so if his line’s working that’s where you’ll reach her.’

  Mati opened the door as she said this, in response to a spirited and prolonged ringing of the bell. A group of Peruvians poured into the tiny room, each wearing bright weaves on top of assorted denim and shouting loudly over each other in what I took to be Quechua.

  Lighting another cigarette, Mati swung round the desk and joined them, sounding firm and conciliatory at the same time. The telephone rang. She looked back at me suggestively. I looked at the burbling telephone as if it were a box with a snake in it. There was no room for doubt, though: she wanted me to answer it. Hitherto I had been busying myself with opening the door, looking blankly at the groups of needy clients as I tried in vain to understand some shred of their excitable introductory speech, and then, with relief, handing them over to the omnicompetent Mati.

  ‘Go on, answer it,’ she said.

  Timidly I lifted the receiver. ‘Hola,’ I said… Nothing, silence.

  ‘Nobody there, Mati,’ I explained thankfully and made to put it down again.

  ‘You have to press the green button to open the line.’

  I pressed the green button and arrived halfway through an impassioned tirade in what I thought may have been Hausa, or perhaps Swahili, but anyway with the unmistakable tones of the African continent. I couldn’t make head nor tail of it. Soon there was a breathy hiatus.

  ‘Could you say that again, please… in Spanish?’

  There was an unfamiliar oath and my interlocutor launched into another language. This was closer to home – it sounded like Egyptian Arabic with an element of Portuguese – but it was still hard to tell what was being said.

  ‘Vous parlez français?’ – problem-solving on the hoof.

  Now there came a fluid but totally incomprehensible French, almost as bad as my own.

  ‘Do you have an appointment?’

  ‘Oui… oui… oui!’

  Now I was getting somewhere. The line, though, was bad and I was surrounded by a constant and raucous babble.

  ‘Tell me your name.’ I frowned and strained, pressed the receiver to one ear and stuck my finger in the other. ‘Sorry, can you repeat that, please?’ We tried again. It seemed more like a poem than a proper noun.

  ‘How about you spell that out?’ I removed the finger from my ear and fumbled among the pages of the appointments book. A group of Moroccan students was crowding around a couple of middle-aged Romanian women and trying to pore over a city plan on the wall. The Moroccans were getting some tart words from the Romanians for pushing.

  ‘Quoi?’ came the voice from the other end of the line, incredulous.

  ‘Spell it out – you know, letters.’ It was only then that I realised what a ridiculous suggestion this was, as whatever tongue this name belonged to, it would be more than likely written in Arabic script, or some baffling ideographic system. But, as Mati had by now settled things with the Andean contingent, she took the telephone from me and, with an indulgent grin, calmly and swiftly sorted it all out.

  It had been a poor showing, and I hung my head a little. Mati was kind to me but I could see that there was a slight element of condescension in her smile. ‘Jeezus,’ I thought, ‘if I can’t even do my bit answering the phones, then what good am I? Where do I go from here?’

  I carried on for a while, opening the door, occasionally taking the phone, when there was nobody else within range. But things didn’t improve much, and at lunchtime I went to seek out Charo, who runs the show, and who manages in her quiet, confident way to keep the lid on the whole heaving shebang. Now, Charo is one of those people who exudes charisma and charm, and along with Mati she is the compelling attraction of Granada Acoge, inspiring bright young lawyers, social workers and interpreters to sign away their free time to the cause. I suspect Che Guevara had a similar magnetism, though perhaps less of the feminine warmth.

  I sat across the desk from Charo, she like a gentle and beautiful headmistress and me the hopeless pupil, but a good bit older than her. �
��I’m afraid I’ve not been of much use,’ I mumbled. ‘I don’t think I was cut out to be a telephonist.’

  Charo was looking at me curiously, trying to fathom out what was going on in my mind. I have this recurrent waking nightmare that women are different from us men in a whole heap of sometimes terrifying ways, the worst being that they can actually read your mind – and no matter how close or intimate you get with a woman she will never ever betray the sorority and tell you the truth. I know this because I’ve often taxed Ana on the subject, but to absolutely no avail. But this terrible suspicion has never left me and probably never will. It’s one of a number of reasons why I’d like to be a woman for a week…

  ‘I’d really like to be useful to you,’ I fumbled on. ‘But if I can’t fulfil the most basic function of your organisation… Well…’

  ‘Well,’ she echoed, leaning back into her chair, ‘we do have a magazine, you know. You said you were a writer…’

  ‘Well, yes…’ I smiled modestly.

  The telephone rang. Charo answered. ‘It’s for you, Cristóbal…’

  ‘For me?’

  ‘Yes…’ she held out the receiver. I looked at it aghast. Oh Lord, I wasn’t going to have to go through another fiasco like the last one in front of Charo.

  ‘Go on, take it. It’s only Mati…’

  Relief flooded over me. ‘Hola, Mati?’